[e2e] It's all my fault

[Vadim Antonov]

On Wed, 16 May 2007, Ken Calvert wrote:

> You are right, one can contemplate.  But as soon as one 
> starts talking about it, lots of folks with a firm grasp of 
> the status quo start saying it'll never work, there's no 
> market for it, etc.

Here you see the division between engineers who design and build things
which make economic sense and academics who think of pure Platonic
technology existing in economic vacuum.

And, yes, network engineers do have to deal with the spillover of bad 
ideas from academia - things which would never get into protocols and 
designs if somebody took trouble to evaluate their economic feasibility 
before sneaking them into standards.

> The only way to overcome that is to build something and use it (what I
> think Reed was talking about).

Yep. *Build* something. To do that you need way more than a neat idea - 
you need capital, you need business plan, you need customers who actually 
wish to buy the product. You need to spend years of your life working like 
hell.  And if you were wrong, you don't get anything for your troubles.

Or you may convince some bureaucrats in DC to give you lots of money they
have taken from us under the threat of jailtime and violence so you can
play with your pet idea.  A lot of people resent that, you know?

As long as you want to go the first route I can only wish the best luck,
and offer some advice - do not talk much about the ideas you intend to
implement, there's a lot of sharks in this water.

If your plan is to organize another federally funded playpen, I (and other
engineering people) will do everything to shoot the proposed neat idea
down, before it becomes another excuse for looting more from us.

I'm all for discussing various neat tricks and gimmicks as a pure mental
excercise, contemplating possibilities, and such.  But I draw the line
when someone starts to talk about implementing his ideas at my expense. I
have neat ideas of my own - and wish to spend my resources on playing with
them.

Did I make my position clear?

--vadim

PS. Sorry for the off-topic.